Harriet: News & Community

Walt Whitman was not one to shy away from the thornier aspects of life in his poetry. Did his courage to confront questions of the self emerge during his years...

The Grand Piano, a “collective autobiography” written by ten of the West Coast so-called Language writers, has been controversial since the publication of its first volume. Some readers love its...

Punk rocker Patti Smith was recently wandering around the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her daughter, Jesse, and her daughter's boyfriend, Michael Campbell, in search of inspiration. They hoped the...

Lately there's been a lot of chatter about the effectiveness (or the lack thereof) of MFA programs . Do they produce great writers, or merely thwart them? Sonya Chung wrote...

Writing Dementia Blog was professor and poet Susan Schultz's way of coping with her mother's decline into a debilitating disease. The poet read from her collection last week as part...

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously penned verse after verse about the natural world, and "The Snow-Storm" is one of his most famous.  This Emerson classic happens to be the Guardian poem...

For the month of November, Harriet is proud to host Paul Martínez Pompa on the @harriet_poetry Twitter feed. Paul joins the growing list of Harriet Twitterati—D.A. Powell, Heather Christle,...

‘all they want to do / is tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it. / They begin beating it with a...

Poet and Editor Robbie Dewhurst has posted a talk he gave on one of Hannah Weiner’s early journals, Country Girl, only recently published. Weiner considered herself clairvoyant and wrote...

Listen to Bernadette Mayer reading a Hallmark Card.